THE LATEST ZAWAHIRI TAPE, his tenth in the last year, will leave some al Qaeda watchers perplexed. In it, Zawahiri refers to his "brothers" in Lebanon and Gaza and links their war with Israel to al Qaeda's jihad against the West. "The shells and rockets ripping apart Muslim bodies in Gaza and Lebanon are not only Israeli [weapons], but are supplied by all the countries of the crusader coalition. Therefore, every participant in the crime will pay the price," Zawahiri says. Bin Laden's number two threatens retaliation for what is being done to his "brothers" in southern Lebanon saying, "We cannot just watch these shells as they burn our brothers in Gaza and Lebanon and stand by idly, humiliated."

Zawahiri's statements run counter to the conventional wisdom. It is widely believed in academic circles and some corridors of the U.S. intelligence community that al Qaeda and Hezbollah are ideological rivals competing for the hearts and minds of potential jihadists. In fact, some experts are already arguing that Zawahiri could not possibly be referring to Hezbollah in the tape and that he must mean al Qaeda's operatives or friends in Lebanon and Gaza.

Just this week, Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, summarized the academic view in the New York Times. "Al Qaeda's Sunni ideology regards Shiites as heretics and profoundly distrusts Shiite groups like Hezbollah," the author of Revival and Reform in Islam tells us. He goes on to argue that jihadist internet chat rooms frequented by al Qaeda are fretting over Hezbollah's success and wondering how to respond. "For al Qaeda," he writes, "it is a time of panic." The group is "unlikely to take a loss of status," caused by Hezbollah's stealing of the headlines, "lying down."

This view has been adopted by some of the more prominent members of the U.S. intelligence community. As Paul Pillar, a former deputy chief of the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA and intelligence officer for the CIA's Near East and South Asia division, wrote in his book Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy:

The limits to bin Ladin's influence, however, are just as important. For one thing, he has very little sway among Shia extremists. Although he and shares some enemies with Iran--the center for Shia radicalism--he and Iran have opposing interests in the fight for Afghanistan, which is important to both of them.

Pillar's assumption is that because Iran was no friend of the Taliban, then al Qaeda and Tehran could not cooperate in any endeavor.

But to accept this view, one must ignore a wealth of evidence.

THE TERRORISTS of Hezbollah and al Qaeda do not behave like textbook automatons. It is never wise to accept al Qaeda's propaganda at face value, but behind Zawahiri's recent statement lies a long-standing relationship between Iran's Hezbollah and al Qaeda. Not only were ideological boundaries insignificant, Tehran's terror proxy has played an instrumental role in al Qaeda's rise.

Consider what two al Qaeda members who joined bin Laden's terrorist coalition through Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad, say on the subject. Testifying at the U.S. Embassy bombings trial, Ali Mohamed and Jamal al Fadl spoke openly about the ties between Iran, Hezbollah and al Qaeda.